Date: 19 August 2020
Time: 3:00 – 4:15pm HKT
Venue: via ZOOM
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This event is co-organized by HKTEA and Centre for Holistic Teaching & Learning (CHTL), Hong Kong Baptist University
Awardee of 2019 – General Faculty Member
Dr. Tushar Chaudhuri
Senior Lecturer (German / German Area Studies / E-Learning)
Programme Coordinator for the German Stream of European Studies
President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Teaching 2018-19
Certified Member of the Association of Learning Technology
Hong Kong Baptist University
About Dr Chaudhuri
Dr Tushar Chaudhuri is Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of the European Studies Programme (German Stream) at HKBU. He holds an M.Phil in Intercultural Learning from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and a PhD in German as a Foreign Language from the University of Gießen, Germany. He has taught German as a Foreign Language to university students in India, Germany and Hong Kong. With globally connected classrooms increasingly becoming possible through technology, he was inspired to use innovative online teaching methods and developed an online platform for students in Hong Kong to learn German by engaging in real-life conversations with overseas partners.
Dr Chaudhuri is also committed to diversification and internationalisation of students’ learning experience through innovative use of cutting-edge technologies and international telecollaborative projects. Through the online telecollaborative projects, he combines language education with global topics, such as sustainable urban development. These projects have reached and impacted over 1 000 secondary and tertiary students, who have been connected to more than 15 universities and over 25 schools in Hong Kong, South East Asia and Europe. The learning experiences have greatly enhanced students’ sense of global awareness and intercultural understanding. Online telecollaborative learning is also his research focus at HKBU.
In recognition of his dedication and commitment to teaching, Dr Chaudhuri was honoured by the HKBU President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Teaching as well as the UGC Teaching Award in 2019.
Event Moderator:
Dr Eva Wong, PhD, PFHEA
Director of Centre for Holistic Teaching & Learning
Title: Global Citizenship in Language Education
Abstract
A university-level education should be a life-changing experience for those who engage its deep learning options, particularly questioning, analysis, and increasingly, in the 21st century, through local and global collaboration. As the former UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon put it: “Education gives us a profound understanding that we are tied together as citizens of the global community and that our challenges are interconnected” (17th September 2013, International Peace Day Message). As an educator, my teaching strategy is constructed around a simple 3C approach: Connect, Collaborate and Construct. The 3C approach is based on the belief that we educate global citizens who are interconnected and who will solve global problems through the collaborative construction of knowledge. In my talk I will elaborate further on the concept of A) Telecollaboration as learning design for Global Citizenship Education and B) on the UGC-Funded telecollaborative project on Integrated Language Learning & Social Awareness (ILLSA) to exemplify what is meant by Global citizenship in a language curriculum.
A) Telecollaboration as learning design
The pre-requisites to global interconnectedness are language proficiency and intercultural competence. I teach German as a Foreign Language and European Area Studies, both of which enable my students to gain access to European philosophical and technological innovation. In a foreign language classroom, to connect means to come in direct contact with artefacts of the foreign language and its cultural components. With the influx of technology into the language classroom, global connections are increasingly becoming possible and becoming part of foreign language pedagogy, chiefly through ‘Telecollaboration’, which underpins my 3C model as its learning design.
“In the context of foreign language education, telecollaboration refers to the application of online communication tools to bring together classes of language learners in geographically distant locations to develop their foreign language skills and intercultural competence through collaborative tasks and project work.” (O’Dowd 2014: 340)
Research on Telecollaboration has shown further that it helps students “to enter into a new realm of collaborative enquiry” (Kern et al. 2004: 254), develop “new online literacies” (Guth & Helm 2010: 19), or to “enter into contact with individuals or groups in the real world” (Dooly & O’Dowd 2012: 19).
B) Exemplifying Global Citizenship Education through Telecollaboration.
A good example of a telecollaborative experience of my students is the Integrated Language Learning & Social Awareness Project (ILLSA). This project on language enhancement uses online platforms to connect French, German, Italian and Spanish learners at universities in Hong Kong and in Europe. Under the topic of “Healthy Cities”, the ILLSA project tasks simultaneously broaden students’ global vision by guiding them to engage in community actions and encouraging them to practice their communicative skills in the foreign language through reflective and research-based problem solving. Each project cycle of around 8 weeks consists of 3 phases: 1. Knowledge Gathering, 2. Research and 3. Community Project. To complete the cycle, a pair of students learning for e.g. German in Hong Kong must collaborate with a pair of students learning German in Europe. This intercultural team meets face-to-face virtually, and gathers, records, and reports their data in a common e-portfolio – in German – hitting assignment milestones throughout the 8-week session.